Laura Cannell – Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth

Even in the world of folk music, where the collection and appropriation of source material from earlier generations is often considered as important as the act of musical creation, inspiration rarely stretches back further than, say, the renaissance. This is understandable, given that musical notation as we know it only stared to be developed in the middle ages. Any performance of music from before this period is therefore often based on a combination of painstaking translation and educated guesswork.

It seems likely that in the years before the existence of a universal written scale of notation, a certain amount of music must have been played in an improvised or semi-improvised fashion. This idea seems to be shared by Laura Cannell. Her new album, Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth, incorporates fragments of melodies from as far back as the fifth century (these are attributed to the Armenian polymath Mesrop Mashtots) and weaves them into drone-heavy, at times almost ambient, compositions and improvisations for fiddle and recorder. This is where the guesswork comes in, and with it a great deal of creativity: Cannell (formerly one half of Horses Brawl) bases her double recorder technique – one in each hand, it would seem – on paintings and sculptures of medieval musicians.

It works incredibly well. The simple liturgical or pastoral melodies of tracks like Hraefn Hroc or The Fiery Spirit are given a twist of the uncanny by the slight discord of the doubled-up woodwind. At its heart it is sacred music, but it’s got a bit of the devil in it, as if it has been relocated from the church to the graveyard.

A sense of place plays an enormous part in the appeal of Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth, perhaps surprisingly so given that it is instrumental in its entirety. It was recorded in a church in rural Norfolk, a part of the countryside famed for its flatness, where points of interest have to be sought with a discerning eye or ear. It is landscape as blank canvass, where it takes an imaginative leap or two to fill in the gaps. But it is also a landscape of dreamlike qualities: often misty, laced with still pools and hidden marshes, where rooks chatter in odd-shaped trees. A landscape of repetitions and subtle changes, of quiet and disquiet: qualities discernable in Cannell’s recordings, particularly the droning, dissonant fiddle pieces like Marsh Land Lullaby and Black Crowned Night.

Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth is unlike anything else you are likely to hear. It borrows as much from the minimalism of Philip Glass or the spacious modernism of Morton Feldman as it does from early music or drone-folk. But it is essentially none of these things. Cannell’s weird and often eerie choice of instruments, her attention to historical and musical detail, and in particular her improvisational prowess give this remarkable and at times elemental album a personality of its own.

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